Royal Outlaw: (Royal Outlaw, Book 1) (40 page)

Mariel remembered the second assassination attack. The ogres in the woods near the capital. There had been nine of them then. Now there were many more. And the powerful zreshlan magician too. She would not escape alive this time.

She shook her head, forcing out the thought.

“The ogres killed the knight, but he,” the magician pointed to the unconscious young man, “kicked his horse and fled like a coward. The ogres killed his horse and cracked the boy’s skull. I used my magic then, as much as I could and then I helped the boy. We stumbled through the forest ahead of the ogres and the white horse found us and then the two guardsmen.”

Mariel looked toward the closed door, half-expecting an army of ogres to burst through it. Already she could hear shouts from the guardsmen outside. They had wasted too much time.

She pointed to the magician. “You, Cara, Hallie, and Isabel will take Derek with you into the carriage. All of the other guardsmen not in this room will go with you and you will take the road that leads directly toward the capital and move as quickly as possible.”

“What about you?” Hallie asked.

“James, Captain Clemens, Tristan, Zeke, and I will ride in the opposite direction. With any luck, the ogres and the Assassin will follow your group—”

“You plan to use us as bait?” Isabel asked, affronted.

“No. When the Assassin realizes I’m not with you he won’t take the time to kill you, he’ll come back to the inn and pick up our trail, but hopefully we’ll have enough of a head start. Now go!” She ordered.

Hallie grabbed Isabel’s arm and started walking toward the door with purpose while the magician used the wall to clamber to his feet. The four guardsmen bent toward Squire Derek to lift him.

“No!” The serving maid cried out, startling everyone. “He’s losing too much blood. He’ll die if he’s moved.”

“Magic must be used to stop the bleeding,” Captain Clemens observed.

Everyone glanced at the magician. He shook his head. “I don’t have any more energy. I used it all up. I can’t heal him.”

James spun toward the princess. “Mariel.”

“No,” she said immediately, knowing exactly what he wanted from her. “We’ve wasted too much time already.”

“He will die.”

“Then let him.”

“He is my cousin!” Cara exclaimed.

“You’ve studied evraïsér, Mariel. You have to do this!”

“I know almost nothing! I always felt evraïsér was a way to cheat.”

“You have to try!”

“I demand to know what you are speaking of?” Isabel exclaimed, but James and Mariel ignored her.

Mariel began speaking in Zreshlan. “
If I heal him, it will use up the energy that I have. I will be unable to escape the Assassin.
”

“Evraïsér
comes from things in nature. Precious gems hold a great deal of power. Use the energy in the emerald on the pommel of
Aracklin.”

“
We must flee now. There is no time
.”

“
All that is necessary is for you to stop the bleeding.
”

Mariel stubbornly shook her head.

“You will just let him die?” James demanded, reverting to Natrician.

“He is a lascivious coward who enjoys taking advantage of people who are less well-off than him. The world will be a better place without him.”

The normally liquid amber of James’s eyes turned hard. In two strides he stood in front of her, his muscles coiled dangerously. His tongue had become forked in his anger.

“I thought you were different,
Princess
Mariel,” he hissed. “But I was wrong. You are just like
them
. Deciding who lives and who dies as though you are a god, lording over us all.”

“He is one of them!” Mariel retorted. “He is one of the nobles who abuse the commoners!”

“He is a living person. You see rank before you see the value of life—all life. If you let him die you will be just like your grandfather and all the de Sharec kings that came before him.”

Mariel slapped him hard across the cheek, but she felt the pain too because she knew he was right. She stepped away from James and drew her sword in smooth motion. “I am not like the king.”

With Aracklin gripped tightly in her hand, she marched toward the unconscious squire. The serving maid wailed and fled to the kitchen where her master and his children had retreated long before. Neither Captain Clemens, nor Tristan, nor Zeke moved to stop her, not when she looked like a fearsome warrior who could strike down anyone who stood in her way.

“Don’t, Mariel!” Hallie screamed, while Cara sobbed.

Mariel reached the table and stared down at the flabby, pale cheeks of the squire who had harassed her and other maids at Lord Stonewell’s fief in another lifetime. Placing her hand just above the wound she opened herself to the world around her, and drew on the hidden power of the emerald.

She began to weave a healing spell. When she cut off the spell, she gasped for breath and forced the dizziness to flee. The use of evraïsér had drained some of her energy, but most of the power had come from the emerald, not her. Luckily, forcing blood to clot was one of the easiest forms of healing. Derek would live and she still had strength and energy left to run.

She sheathed her sword, and glanced around the room. Everyone, except James, stood slack-jawed, staring at her.

“If any of you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone—especially Dreyfuss—I will personally slit your throat.” She glared at the magician and Isabel specifically when she said this. “Time to move.”

Her forceful words knocked them from the spell of shock.

“You have the gift of magic?” Captain Clemens asked in astonishment.

“No. I know how to
use
magic. There’s a difference. Isn’t there?” She asked the magician-priest, who managed a blush and looked at the floor. “Get him to the carriage before the ogres decide to start a battle.”

The men lifted the flabby noble from the table and proceeded out the door where the other guards waited on their mounts surrounding the carriage that had never been unpacked. Most of the men sat on their horses with their naked swords in their hands, staring at the dark edge of the forest where they knew the enemy waited.

Squire Derek was deposited inside the carriage and the magician crawled in after. The lady’s maids hesitated, but a load roar from the forest sent Isabel diving into the carriage without decorum. When she was inside, she screamed at Hallie and Cara to come so they could leave.

Hallie pulled Mariel into a tight embrace. “Stay safe,” she whispered, and then climbed into the carriage.

James, Captain Clemens, Tristan, and Zeke had mounted their horses and drawn their swords. Iyela, wearing neither saddle nor bridle, appeared in the midst of the group. It was time to go.

“Get in the carriage,” Mariel told Cara, shoving her a little.

To Mariel’s surprise, the normally obedient girl dug her heels into the frozen soil. “No!”

“What?”

“I’m coming with you. I want to help.”

Mariel could not believe her ears. “You’ll be safer with the other girls in the carriage.”

Cara stood her ground and set her jaw into a determined line that Mariel had never seen. “I’m coming with you. If you go mad, you’ll need me to keep you on the horse.”

Another roar came from the forest. She did not have time for the luxury of argument.

“Fine.”

Mariel grabbed Iyela’s mane and sprang onto the unicorn’s back, then she held out her hand to Cara. The younger girl hesitated. The bravery she had shown a moment before wavered at the prospect of riding without a saddle. But then she took her friend’s hand and Mariel pulled her up behind her.

“Go!” Mariel ordered.

The coachman snapped the reins against the backs of the four horses and the carriage lurched into motion, aiming northeast. Mariel and her small group turned in the opposite direction. Cara shrieked and acted as a second corset to Mariel when Iyela smoothly leapt into a canter. 

The glowing moon and stars in the night sky reflected brightly on the snow, casting light in the forest. What the glimmering snow revealed was enough to make Mariel wish they were running headlong into a wild blizzard where visibility was zero. Moving shadows began to close in on her group that struggled to flee before they were forced to fight for their lives. The decoy plan had failed. They had waited too long to leave. The ogres had been close enough to see Mariel mount the unicorn.

The pace was not fast enough. Mariel wanted to
fly
across the land in the way only unicorns were capable, but the mass of roiling ogre bodies beginning to encircle them made that impossible. The group was forced to slow their running mounts and form up in a group with their swords at the ready. The mass of ogres approached slowly. They were keenly aware that they had the advantage of numbers, but also conscious of the deadly weapons in possession of Mariel and her guards.

The fear Mariel had felt tingling her skin began to sink deep into her. Fear powered her desire to escape. A fear that sprang from a mysterious, powerful enemy and a forgotten past. The memories were stirring. They were coming awake even as Mariel gripped Iyela’s mane tighter in one hand and Aracklin in the other.

When the diameter of the ogre circle reached forty feet, the pace of approach changed dramatically. The ogres howled a blood curdling war cry and raised their clubs to the sky. The entire mass of bodies moved as one, lurching toward Mariel and her small group.

The healing of the fat noble boy had taken up the precious minutes they needed for escape.

But no. Mariel could not lie to herself here as she lifted Aracklin and began to bring it down on the large head of an ogre. It was not the healing that had wasted time, it was the arguing. And that was her fault.

The angry power she put behind the swing of the sword dispatched the life of the ogre instantly. Cara screamed into Mariel’s back, clutching tighter as the ogres moved in.

There were too many of them to kill. But maybe they were not trying to kill her. Maybe they would trap her and wait for their master, the zreshlan assassin.

Such fear gripped her that she stopped the swing of her sword and stared at its bloody shaft. How easy it would be to turn the blade on herself and spare her from facing the Assassin. If she was dead, there would be no fear, weakness, or shame. She would be free, not forced to live a life she detested in the opulent, courtly world she had spent half of her life trying to destroy.

How easy the option of death was.

The guardsmen screamed war cries and pressed against the throng of massive bodies surrounding them and their charge. Warm blood splattered Mariel across her cold, exposed face. It was a jolt to her system and it brought her back to sanity.

Suicide was the easy way. It was the cowardly way. Mariel was not weak.

The ogres did not want to trap her, they wanted to kill her. The Assassin wanted her dead. The end result was what mattered, not the means. If she took her own life she would let him win, and that was not okay with Mariel.

Screaming a fierce cry into the chilly winter night, she rejoined the battle. James, Captain Clemens, Zeke, Tristan, and Iyela moved closer together in their circle. The five warriors swung their swords and utilized every weapon they had as the unicorn bit and kicked ferociously. But where the ogres fell, more filled their places.

They should not have been this easy to kill. Mariel knew that, but she also understood that ogres were large. Ogres needed space to fight and with so many of their kin pressing around them, they did not have the space they needed. In single-combat it was Mariel’s group that had the advantage, but the numbers of ogres were overwhelming and eventually the humans, the serpentramels, and the horses would wear down. The Assassin was fighting a battle of attrition.

James seemed to understand this too. “Zeke,” he shouted over the din of howling ogres and the sound of weapon striking weapon and bodies falling. “
Morphe!
”

The two men were instantly replaced by serpents. James took his familiar form with its two-inch long fangs. On the horse next to James rose a long, thin brownish snake with a cobra-like neck-flap open. The gaboon viper and the black mamba hissed.

The effect the transformation caused was almost instantaneous. Tristan cried out in shock, while Captain Clemens continued to fight as though he had not noticed two of his companions turn into snakes. Cara, who had seen James shift before, had not known Zeke was also serpentramel, but her eyes were shut and her face was pressed into Mariel’s back, so that she had no idea what was going on.

The serpents launched from the saddles of their horses and wrapped around the necks of two of the ogres. Serpentramel poison was far more deadly than the average snake poison and the two ogres crumpled as it stopped their hearts.

As James and Zeke launched their snake-form selves at other victims, the ogres pushed and shoved to get out of the way. Fights among the ogres broke out, and they began to do the job of Mariel and her guards. Fear did that to people. Ogres would stand against whole armies and fight to the death, but from poisonous serpents they fled.